Correlative analysis of molecular markers with phenotypic signatures is the simplest model for hypothesis generation. In this paper, a panel of 24 breast cell lines was grown in 3D culture, their morphology was imaged through phase contrast microscopy, and computational methods were developed to segment and represent each colony at multiple dimensions. Subsequently, subpopulations from these morphological responses were identified through consensus clustering to reveal three clusters of round, grape-like, and stellate phenotypes. In some cases, cell lines with particular pathobiological phenotypes clustered together (e.g., ERBB2 amplified cell lines sharing the same morphometric properties as the grape-like phenotype). Next, associations with molecular features were realized through (i) differential analysis within each morphological cluster, and (ii) regression analysis across the entire panel of cell lines. In both cases, the dominant genes that are predictive of the morphological signatures were identified. Specifically, PPAR? has been associated with the invasive stellate morphological phenotype, which corresponds to triple-negative pathobiology. PPAR? has been validated through two supporting biological assays.

A panel of cell lines of diverse molecular background offers an improved model system for high-content screening, comparative analysis, and cell systems biology. A computational pipeline has been developed to collect images from cell-based assays, segment individual cells and colonies, represent segmented objects in a multidimensional space, and cluster them for identifying distinct subpopulations. While each segmentation strategy can vary for different imaging assays, representation and subpopulation analysis share a common thread. Application of this pipeline to a library of 41 breast cancer cell lines is demonstrated. These cell lines are grown in 2D and imaged through immunofluorescence microscopy. Subpopulations in this panel are identified and shown to correlate with previous subtyping literature that was derived from transcript data.

This paper presents a computational framework for chemical pro.ling of the plant cell wall through the Raman spectroscopy. The system enables query of known spectral signatures and clustering of spectral data based on intrinsic properties. As a result, presence and relative concentration of speci.c chemical bonds can be quanti.ed. The primary contribution of this paper is in representation of raman pro.le in terms of .uorescence background and multiscale peak detection at each grid point (voxel). Such a representation allows ef.cient spatial segmentation based on the coupling between high-level salient properties and low-level symbolic representation at each voxel. The high-level salient properties refer to preferred peaks and their attributes for the entire image. The low-level symbolic representations are based on .uorescence background, spectral peak locations, and their attributes. We present results on a corn stover tissue section that is imaged through Raman microscopy, and the results are consistent with the literature. In addition, automatic clustering indicates several distinct layers of the cell walls with different spectral signatures.

The existing literature on immigrant Korean Protestant churches in North America typically addresses identity formation and dynamics of assimilation in the context of North American religious pluralism and multiculturalism, particularly focusing on the role of religion in “maintaining ethnicity” and “preserving traditions.” In this literature, the immigrant Korean church is depicted as an ethnic enclave, a bounded territorial enclosure that facilitates adjustment and transition into the mainstream. The argument presented in this paper reconceptualizes the immigrant Korean church as an “extroverted space,” with a profoundly “global sense of place.” First, I examine the articulation of divine destiny and theological conservatism in the production of a missionary designation called the “10/40 Window,” locating Korean and Korean American evangelicals in transnational and transdenominational movements pivoting around the U.S.-South Korea axis. Second, in a case study of an evangelical cell church, which employs multiple strategies to propagate across spatial scales, I underscore the extent to which the cell church reproduces hierarchical and patriarchal regimes of power. Finally, in foregrounding interconnectedness at all spatial scales, as illustrated by the cell church, this paper re-conceptualizes the immigrant Korean church not as an enclosure, but as a power-laden field of both material and metaphorical practices that stretch far beyond the locality.

This dissertation concerns the politics of space, gender, and difference with a focus on contemporary Korean evangelical Christian missions. Through a multi-sited, global ethnography of several missionary projects, I examine how overseas mission destinations are imagined, how transnational missionary networks are mobilized, and how missions actually operate on the ground. I discuss how contemporary Korean and Korean American missionary movements operate simultaneously as ambitious world-making projects and concretely localized practices, producing and reproducing multiply rendered world imaginaries by engaging in both universalistic and culturally specific sets of commitments and strategies. Rather than narrowly define proselytizing missions in terms of a religious mandate for domination and conversion, this study suggests that missions in fact seek to corroborate faithfulness in larger matters of modernity, progress, and achievement.

I argue that the history of military and geopolitical alliance between South Korea and the US has had a profound effect on Korean evangelical Christianity, and that a sense of indebtedness to American generosity heavily influences the content and form of contemporary Korean missions. A sense of Korean affinity to US hegemony is manifest in their use of racialized geographical imaginaries through which Korean missionaries articulate their place in the world. The phenomenal growth of world missions can be traced to multi-scalar strategies for church growth and expansion, and spatial logics of evangelical propagation that connect the body politic of local congregations with the geopolitics of world missions. The underground missionary networks aiding North Koreans in China employ custodial power and offer capitalist deliverance, rendering as inextricable capitalism, democracy, and Christianity. Affective encounters through short-term missions to developing nations like Uganda and Tanzania reinforce in visceral and emotional terms the link between Christian salvation and capitalist development, and empower a developmentalist understanding of the world. As such, I conclude by suggesting that contemporary evangelical missions are deeply intertwined with the secular projects of international development aid and humanitarian relief. Insofar as missions rely on a wholesale faith in capitalist development, geographical imaginations that valorize the inherent virtues of the compassionate donor, the heroic aid provider, and the devoted volunteer, evangelical missionaries perpetuate the power-laden systems of inequality that in turn rationalize a need for overseas missions, religious or humanitarian.

“Quietly Pressing” explores the class, gender, racial, and labor politics in the U.S. massage work industry by focusing on the work and lived experiences of Chinese and Chinese American women massage workers (hereinafter “Chinese massage workers”). Grounded in ethnography and in-depth interviews with Chinese massage workers in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, my research brings workers’ stories to explore how they experience, wrestle with, and do massage work in the context of racialized, sexualized Asian massage work. I argue that Chinese massage workers’ stories and strategies reveal the deep hierarchies of labor used to justify the ongoing devaluation of women of color’s labor, particularly migrant women. Nevertheless, Chinese massage workers learned to push back and create better conditions for their work and life. This dissertation investigates the range of creative strategies Chinese women develop, from highlighting genuine care to displaying health knowledge to remaining quiet, as they navigate their lives as Chinese massage workers. Chinese women’s stories teach us about the demands of care, the blurred boundaries between health and sex, and how we can minimize, refuse, and even resist work in the meantime. By minimizing emotional labor exerted at work through quiet tactics of withholding, these women are preserving the bandwidth for engaging in emotional labor with the care recipient they select. In other words, by withholding care from the client, the intended care recipient, Chinese massage workers are pilfering their care, which is expected by management to be exerted at work, to preserve their energy to redistribute it to their chosen care recipient such as their friends and children. This preservation and redistribution of care is resisting the working conditions of socially necessary care and refusing the capitalist logic of care that hierarchize deserving care receiving and giving subjects.

My work frames Chinese workers as knowledge producers, recognizing and examining the various working conditions they navigate and struggle against, often with grace and sometimes quietly. Centering Chinese workers’ negotiations of massage work, my research takes seriously the racialized and sexualized history of Asian women’s care labor to highlight how workers push back against narratives that oversexualize their work and seek to redefine the value of their labor. Drawing from feminist theories of work, I examine both Chinese massage workers’ disavowal of sex work and parallel insistence on the significance of intimate care work, highlighting how they engage subversive tactics to redefine hard work. I use a multisensorial ethnographic method to highlight how Chinese massage workers’ stories expose the problem with racializing and sexualizing massage work, the problem is with work at large, and how we might imagine and study new strategies of wrestling with and maybe even resisting work. Altogether, the story I tell unfurls some of the brilliant strategies these Chinese women massage workers use to fight against this complex nexus of power relations that misunderstands, diminishes, and criminalizes their labor.